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FREE! An Email Newsletter Using ASP Smart Mailer and Advanced HTML Editor

So your web presence is coming along a treat. The site looks nice, the functionality is running smoothly and the visitor numbers are rising. But to build that community spirit a newsletter is needed.

 

Well if you're in that situation, take a look at Matt Machell's latest tutorial where he describes how you can use Dreamweaver MX 2004 along with the DMXZone ASP Smart Mailer and Advanced HTML Editor extensions to produce a straightforward mailing list and newsletter application.

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How to Debug JavaScript

In the last of his real-world JavaScript tutorials, Tom Dell'Aringa recognises that just once in a blue moon (ahem), you might write a script that doesn't work. There's loads of articles on DMXzone on how to write JavaScripts, but how to debug your programs has been a neglected area. Until now ... Read More

FREE! Building A File Upload and Rating Application

Following on from his free tutorial on building a Content Management System with Server Behaviours and the Advanced HTML Editor, Matt shows how build a site that allows users to upload their own files, and rate those files. There's also a password-protected moderator's area so that you can be sure that all files can be checked before being made "live".

This free tutorial is suitable for beginners and uses only built-in Dreamweaver server behaviors and the DMXzone Pure ASP/  ASP.NET Upload Extensions! The uploading element is also PHP compatible, but the "rating" system doesn't work with PHP since it has no Command behavior to do the rating with.

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Quick and Dirty Coding with JavaScript Snippets

Dreamweaver includes several dozen code "snippets" and functions to help you quickly add JavaScript to your Web pages. These self-contained JavaScript code fragments and functions are used to perform common tasks including everything from calculating the area of a circle to opening a new pop-up window.

 

In this beginner's article, Jason shows how to use the Snippets panel, and how to store your own favourite pieces of code as snippets for re-use next time.

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Free: Using Advanced HTML Editor to Create a Content Management System

In this free, 20 page tutorial, Matt Machell shows you how to use Dreamweaver server behaviours and the DMXzone Advanced HTML Editor extension to build a password-protected Content Management Solution for a web site, that allows normal users to read news or text or whatever you choose to put on your site, while users with the correct password can add or amend the text using an intuitive word processor-like administration system - so your clients can maintain their own web sites without having to know HTML and without risking breaking the look and feel of the site!

Because Matt's using the extension and built-in server behaviours, there's no handcoding involved, so matt shows you how to use it using both ASP and PHP.

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JavaScript: Disabling and Enabling Form Fields Dynamically

Sometimes you have a form that has dependencies. By this I mean that one (or more) field's values depend on another field's values. For example, you may not want the user to fill in field B until the user has filled in field A.

One way to solve this is to dynamically hide and show form fields, which we have talked about in the past. Some people don’t like parts of their form disappearing and reappearing on them, however. If that is the case what you can do is disable and enable them instead.

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JavaScript Basics in Dreamweaver MX

If you want to present anything more than static images and text on your Web page, you will need to script it. Scripting allows you to add code to tell the Web page when to perform an action in reaction to an event. With scripts, you have the power to sense events that happen on the screen, such as the mouse pointer passing over a graphic, and then have the Web page perform a particular action (or reaction really), for example, change the graphic just rolled over.

 

In this tutorial, Jason shows you how to add JavaScript to your page using Dreamweaver MX or MS 2004 using the <script> container; how to ensure that users without JavaScript can see content with the <noscript> container, and also how to link to external .js files using DMX and MX 2004

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The JavaScript News Ticker

When the web was born, web authors inevitably put up some pretty cheesy web sites. When JavaScript was born, cheese rose to heights unimagined! The news ticker is one of those things of which I’m not sure belongs in the cheese category or not. It can be a useful little tool to draw attention to the latest headlines.

One such ticker can be seen at the BBC News web site, over at http://news.bbc.co.uk/. I think the nice thing about the ticker is that it is done in a tasteful manner. It doesn’t dominate the page. Each news piece is a link to that story, and it doesn’t use any real cheesy effects to draw undue attention to it.

Each title stays around long enough so it doesn’t get annoying. With these things in mind, it seems like it could be a nice addition to a web site. So let’s tear it apart, build it back up again in our patented simplified manner and make use of it!

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Adding Rollovers and Navigation Bars in Dreamweaver

Letting the visitor know where they are and where they are going are the key ingredients for a good navigation system. Yet, with static HTML, this can be problematic. There is a limited amount of space on the computer screen, and Web designs have to walk the narrow line between providing enough information to let the visitor know what is going on and not overwhelming them with so much information that they can not find what they are looking for. Fortunately, JavaScript allows us to make quick changes to a Web page in reaction to the visitor's actions without having to reload the page.

 

A more advanced form of the rollover is the Navigation bar. This allows you to quickly assemble a collection of menu options with rollovers, which you can conveniently edit at any time.

Dreamweaver did not invent the rollover or the navigation bar, but both Dreamweaver MX and Dreamweaver MX 2004 allow you set them up quickly and easily without having to know all of the complexities of JavaScript.

 

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Two Dimensional Arrays and other Goodies

This week I’m going to give you a few tricks of the trade to use involving three things: Two dimensional arrays, using window.onload with an anonymous function and using the DOM to build a new SELECT form element. Sound obscure? I've used … er, I mean a friend of mine has used these techniques for loading advertising banners , and using a script to randomly select one of the array items in the first column, which is the banner, then grabs the associated link from the second column. Anything along those lines it would be great for.

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JavaScript: Introduction to Cookies

How does DMXzone.com remember who you are when you login? How does amazon know what you've bought? Cookies! No prior knowledge required, this tutorial will help you set and read cookies from your own sites using JavaScript on the client's machine. Now you can begin to add personalisation, by-pass log-in procedures by "remembering" users, welcome back visitors by the name they registered with - and all of those other sophisticated e-commerce functions that make your site stand out from the Geocities crowd.

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The JavaScript Date Picker

Sooner or later you’re going to have the need for a user to fill in a field with a date. It’s like Murphy’s Law, it’s inevitable. In any event, one nice way of handling the situation is to provide some kind of widget to allow the user to pick the date instead of having them type the date in manually. Typing in dates manually can often be a problem, especially with a global medium like the web; Americans write 3 January 1/3; Europeans write 3/1. Are your dates 03/01/04? 3/1/04? 1/3/04? 1/3/2004? A date picker, when a user clicks on a date from a calendar-like interface can smooth the process.
 
Such a widget provides a couple of nice features. First of all, it helps you make sure the application gets good data. While it’s quite easy for the user to mistype a date, a correctly built script can place a correctly formatted date in your field 100% of the time.

This tutorial builds the Date Picker in JavaScript. You can cut and paste the code into your own appliciations.

This tutorial is for the intermediate developers in JavaScript.

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